Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Successful Marriages eBook

I

It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all
have, of Peter Brench that his main success in life
would have consisted in his never having committed
himself about the work, as it was called, of his friend
Morgan Mallow. This was a subject on which it
was, to the best of his belief, impossible with veracity
to quote him, and it was nowhere on record that he
had, in the connexion, on any occasion and in any
embarrassment, either lied or spoken the truth.
Such a triumph had its honour even for a man of other
triumphs—­a man who had reached fifty, who
had escaped marriage, who had lived within his means,
who had been in love with Mrs Mallow for years without
breathing it, and who, last but not least, had judged
himself once for all. He had so judged himself
in fact that he felt an extreme and general humility
to be his proper portion; yet there was nothing that
made him think so well of his parts as the course
he had steered so often through the shallows just
mentioned. It became thus a real wonder that the
friends in whom he had most confidence were just those
with whom he had most reserves. He couldn’t
tell Mrs Mallow—­or at least he supposed,
excellent man, he couldn’t—­that she
was the one beautiful reason he had never married;
any more than he could tell her husband that the sight
of the multiplied marbles in that gentleman’s
studio was an affliction of which even time had never
blunted the edge. His victory, however, as I
have intimated, in regard to these productions, was
not simply in his not having let it out that he deplored
them; it was, remarkably, in his not having kept it
in by anything else.

The whole situation, among these good people, was
verily a marvel, and there was probably not such another
for a long way from the spot that engages us—­the
point at which the soft declivity of Hampstead began
at that time to confess in broken accents to Saint
John’s Wood. He despised Mallow’s
statues and adored Mallow’s wife, and yet was
distinctly fond of Mallow, to whom, in turn, he was
equally dear. Mrs Mallow rejoiced in the statues—­though
she preferred, when pressed, the busts; and if she
was visibly attached to Peter Brench it was because
of his affection for Morgan. Each loved the other
moreover for the love borne in each case to Lancelot,
whom the Mallows respectively cherished as their only
child and whom the friend of their fireside identified
as the third—­but decidedly the handsomest—­of
his godsons. Already in the old years it had
come to that—­that no one, for such a relation,
could possibly have occurred to any of them, even to
the baby itself, but Peter. There was luckily
a certain independence, of the pecuniary sort, all
round: the Master could never otherwise have
spent his solemn Wanderjahre in Florence and
Rome, and continued by the Thames as well as by the
Arno and the Tiber to add unpurchased group to group
and model, for what was too apt to prove in the event